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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (R) talking with relatives of the victims of Istanbul terror attacks during a funeral ceremony at Istanbul Police Department headquarters in Istanbul.KAYHAN OZER/AFP

Turkey’s security situation is at best tenuous. Its security forces are embattled, overstretched and unable to deal with Turkey’s multiple terrorism threats.

Saturday night’s double bombing of the Besiktas Vodafone soccer stadium was a brazen and audacious attack. Not only did it inflict maximum carnage, killing over 38 people of whom most were riot police, but it also hit a central Istanbul landmark, just a few minutes walk from the popular Taksim square and the country’s presidential offices.

It was timed just as the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had arrived from Ankara to visit Istanbul and attend weekend meetings.

These attacks which not only took the lives of 33 people, but it also directly targeted a convey of Turkish military personnel passing through the neighborhood that houses the military’s headquarters and Turkey’s parliament, the Grand National Assembly.

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According to the International Crisis Group, since July 2015 the renewed fighting has claimed the lives of 2,393 people, of whom 372 were civilians, 986 PKK militants and 816 members of the security services.

In October 2015, just a few weeks before parliamentary elections, a double bombing hit a rally co-hosted by the Kurdish oriented Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). 103 civilians were left dead. In all of these cases the so-called “Islamic State” (or ISIS) was held responsible.

Partly as a response, in August 2016 Turkey intervened in Syria, an operation it called ‘Euphrates Shield’. Its targets: the Islamic State, the PKK’s Syrian Kurdish affiliate the Democratic Union Party (PYD), and, according to President Erdogan none other than Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad. It was only after an irked Russia sought clarification that Erdogan scratched out Assad from the target list.

Islamic State, the PKK, Assad, and not to mention other smaller terrorist groups such as the Marxist Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP-C) - one could be forgiven in thinking that Turkey’s security forces are overstretched.

But to make matters worse, since July of this year, Turkey has been under a state of emergency following a failed military coup allegedly organized by members of the armed forces loyal to the Pennsylvania based Islamic preacher Fetullah Gulen.

Since the failed coup, purges have taken place across Turkish society and state institutions. However, it is the military and police which are bearing the brunt of the crackdowns.

This, at a time of a heightened security threat. This compounds the doubt that the country’s security forces have the capabilities to deal with the terror threat.

The outpouring of patriotic sentiment since the failed coup, the cities and towns adorned with banner slogans declaring: “We are Turkey, we will not allow the country to be taken over by coups or terror” may have declarative value, but certainly not operative effect in fighting terror.

These are sentiments that he and other ministers have often made after terrorist attacks. Erdogan seems to be preparing Turkish civilians for the inevitability of more attacks, and without free public debate about whether he has overplayed his hand in the post-coup purges, weakening Turkey’s police and military capacity to prevent attacks, its civilians may be more exposed than before.

This language of martyrdom, together with the overwhelmed security forces, indicate, sadly, that more terrorist attacks like Saturday’s outrage are unavoidable in the foreseeable future.

However, the question remains: for how long will Turkish citizens have to endure them? As the father of one of Saturday’s victims, a teenage medical student, stated in Turkish, “I didn’t want my son to be a martyrtomorrow they will just leave flowers and thennothing”.

Simon A. Waldman is the co-author of the recently published ‘The New Turkey and Its Discontents’. Follow him on Twitter: @simonwaldman1

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